If you’re looking for something new to watch this week, look no further than the tangly new Wander Darkly. Think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets Inception, Groundhog’s Day, and It’s a Wonderful Life. So take a trip into Tara Miele’s surreality in a captivating unusual romantic-thriller film hybrid in our latest film review, Wander Darkly.
“Is this real-life, or is it purgatory?” That’s the existential question in escaping my existence in a year filled with dreadful existentialism writing my film review for Wander Darkly. Writer-director Tara Miele’s Wander Darkly is a beautifully haunting tessellation that slips in and out of reality.
Adrienne (Sienna Miller) and Matteo (Diego Luna) are new parents reigniting their spark. Sadly, the pair’s once incandescent sparkle is now a dull glimmer due to life’s stress, and the pair bicker over the usual relationship killers. Money, trust issues, familial stress, a new baby, and resentment all ruminate heavily around the couple’s night out. Unable to hide their tension, the couple argues if it’s worth the fight; and in the blink of an eye, life gets real in one singular crashing moment.
In the wake of the car accident, we see Adrienne come to, or at least we think. Indeed, there are so many questions that flash before you as time begins to weave through Adrienne and Matteo’s life together. Viewers aren’t sure if Adrienne is alive— or in fact, dead with blood on her body and face seeing her corpse at the morgue.
Equally confused is Adrienne, as she picks up the fragmented pieces of her deconstructed memory. Is this is her new routine, or, instead, is it a second chance with Matteo?
What follows is a tangly mind-bending parallel narrative of memories, flashbacks/flashforwards, and magic realism as viewers begin to see a timeline of Adrienne and Matteo’s love story.
We see the couple’s happier times, such as visiting Matteo’s family in Mexico, creating memories, yet with the good also comes the bad.
In flashforwards, we Adrienne’s mother (Beth Grant) talking to Ellie (Inde Navarrette), now in her adolescence, about her mom in the past tense; meanwhile, Matteo is untraceable. This emotional roller coaster of self-reflection leads Adrienne to think that she’s dead. Matteo, unwilling to accept this, coaches Adrienne through their retellings to help her through the emotional trauma she’s experiencing.
Our suspense stitches a patchwork of memories of a couple we don’t know, but it’s the actors’ charm that often carries most fuzzy metaphysical scenes. These nebulous memories clash because we hear both sides. Both are painfully revised as both forget specific details. However, both remember the start of each other’s thread that begins the unraveling.
Then there’s Carolina Costa’s trippy cinematography. The camera work is intimate and details the characters as they experience life to the dazy surreal moments in time. The shifting changes are instantaneous and make for a less than ideal smooth effortlessness. Due to the clunky overlapping memories, there’s no investment until the third act into Adrienne and Matteo’s love story. We don’t know them as a couple, but the focus on their relationship is straight away. Yet, against all odds, the pair’s destinies seem meant for one another.
Miele fills in the blanks, and the kinks of the patchwork memory retellings unfold. Vague memories now have answers, although it was needlessly complicated to cipher through. Still, Sienna Miller and Diego Luna are engrossing in touching moments of loss and grief. So while the film isn’t perfectly structured, the moving message of hope is there. Wander Darkly is now available to rent/VOD.
